Eclipse crashes with “Unable to create new native thread” - any ideas? (my settings and info inside)

Question

I\'m having trouble with Eclipse routinely crapping out on me (and being generally sluggish) and I was wondering if anyone could give me any insight. The message that gets t

Answer 1

It appears that there is not enough memory for new thread stack. On Windows, process space is 2GB. For heap you initially allocate 1Gb (-Xms option), so it's locked from the beginning. Minus 256Mb for classes (PermSize), minus JVM overhead which could be as much as 0.5Gb. So as a result, your threads have only about 256Mb for stacks, which is maximum 64 threads (256/4m).

Solution: Try to lower stack size to -Xss1024k or reduce initial heap size (-Xms).

Related reading about OutOfMemory: unable to create thread

As a side note, -XX:MaxPermSize=256m looks too small for Eclipse for EE. Better to set to 384.

Cheers, Max

Answer 2

I also had trouble with Eclipse Luna on Fedora 20. I've read a lot about different memory options and still couldn't figure out the problem. It drove me crazy.

Finally I realized that by default, the number of processes a regular user can have on Fedora is very limited. Content of limits.d/90-nproc.conf:

*          soft    nproc     1000

Raising this to 5000 fixed my "Unable to create new native thread" problems.